OK, Stop Us if You’ve Heard This Before ...

Breathlessly, the word has come from a meeting of NFL owners. Los Angeles is back in the game.

There will be a pause here to allow time for back flips. Or yawns.

At some nice hotel in Denver, with the usual gathering of sportswriters waiting in the lobby like lapdogs, a group of 11 NFL owners, ordered to get serious with the NFL-in-Los-Angeles issue, told Commissioner Paul

Tagliabue he can go ahead and pay for an architect to tell him about some nice steel beams and draw some pictures.

They said Tagliabue could spend $10 million for this -- $5 million for drawings of a new Coliseum and another $5 million for a rendering of a stadium in the parking lot at Angel Stadium. The Anaheim architect will call his work the Anaheim Parking Lot Drawing of Los Angeles.

News stories may appear to paint a rosy picture, and that’s understandable because reporters need to report the words of rosy painters. Columnists find the smudges.

Immediately, in the wake of this startling step by the NFL, there are questions:

Why all these fancy meetings to approve an amount of money most of these owners spend on wine cellars for their garages?

And, why didn’t we all go to architectural school?

There are other questions:

These owners meet so much, how do they have time to own?

Also, didn’t they allot $10 million to “study” Carson as a potential site three or four years ago? Can’t you “study” Carson by driving by on the freeway, looking at the big, old field there, and, even with the price of gas these days, not get close to $10 million?

Actually, the big question is the same one asked ever since the Rams and Raiders departed for sweeter deals after the 1994 season: Whom does the NFL think it is kidding?

This is an annual rite of spring. The college kids go to Daytona, the swallows come back to Capistrano and the NFL says it is going to find a way to come back to L.A.

Sure, and Al Davis once dated Mother Teresa.

It is not that the NFL is totally insincere. Of course it would like to be back in L.A. Rich people know a gold mine when they see one. But figuring out how to own it without investing a nugget of their own has always left them baffled.

The game, for NFL owners, is to make it look as if they care, as if they’ve figured it out. Can’t be too harsh on somebody who is trying hard, right?

The reality is that the process is incredibly difficult, maybe impossible. They are trying to climb Mt. Everest in running shorts and dress shoes.

For the NFL to get back to L.A., among the almost insurmountable steps are:

* The need to get somebody to assume the bank loans on the stadium the NFL says it will begin building inside the Coliseum walls and will cost $800 million. Then that same person will get to write another check for as much as $1 billion just to buy the team.

Why a new owner? Do you think the NFL will let somebody who screwed up a team somewhere else to the point where it was movable just come in and take over the gold mine?

* The need to get near unanimity on this. If you study the history of this group, they say OK in unison only when they have to, such as when their backs were against the wall a few months ago and they needed a new collective bargaining agreement.

And now that that’s in place, something that includes clauses that the big franchises will help out the smaller ones with some revenue sharing, it is illogical to think that owners will easily take on something else new, expensive and scary.

* The need to convince the new L.A. owner, now seeing as much as $1.8 billion missing from his account every time he goes to the ATM, that he will need to pitch in lots more money than he thought, money he’d penciled in for debt service. He will be, after all, one of the big guys because he has the L.A. market.

* The need to take care of the existing tenant, USC, which can nicely take care of them, if it isn’t happy, by closing lots of gates to lots of parking lots on Sundays in the fall.

USC is generally OK with an NFL team being here. It has watched several come and go while remaining a loyal rent payer since 1923.

Currently, USC sells nearly 90,000 seats a game. This new stadium wouldn’t have that many. Currently, USC plays second fiddle to nobody. That would change. And currently, USC plays the highest quality football in that stadium. That probably wouldn’t change.

* The need to do this without any significant public money. The stance on that has been clear for some time: L.A. doesn’t put packages under the Christmas tree for people who have wine cellars in their garages.

But while doing this, the owners also need to finesse other NFL cities about the inconsistency of asking them for tax funds and not doing so in Los Angeles. Some cities feel the need to be validated as big league by an NFL presence. Los Angeles does not.

The solution for all of us is easy, and has two steps:

1. Take a deep breath.

2, At the next TV broadcast, newspaper story, chat over the water cooler or conversation with a taxi driver that includes “NFL” and “Los Angeles,” ask the following questions:

Did the NFL announce an owner’s name? Team? Date of first shovel into ground? Season of first game?

Did it point to a significant contribution, not just pocket change, that would jump-start the deal and would use money it wouldn’t get back?

Was the announcement missing the terms “proposal,” “study” or “projection”?

Finally, was it missing a sentence about when the next meeting about this would take place, and at what swanky hotel?

If all those tests are passed, the NFL will be here. And where will here be?

Why, the In-N-Out Burger Paul Tagliabue Coliseum and Center for the Study of Trojan Horses, of course.

Bill Dwyre can be reached at Bill.Dwyre@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Dwyre, go to latimes.com/dwyre.